Mozilla has released the 2.0 release of the Firefox web browser. Among the new features is built in spellcheck and javascript 1.7 support. However, there are critiques that are critical of the User Interface. (The blank bar, I thought, was the bookmarks toolbar folder area where you could put bookmarks of rss feeds or most frequently visited sites… I could be wrong…)
I do think George is right in one respect, tabbed browsing needs to be “more evident” in firefox.
I just re-visited sitemaps last night to take a look at some of the new tools they’ve rolled out. Google announced that they were adding a few features in the last couple days. Crawl statistics (and control over slow/normal/fast crawl speed) is one of the additions, also it’s possible to tag images for better searching and the number of URL’s read from a sitemap. Nice, I’d LOVE to see them add the pagerank (in google toolbar form) on the page that they show the report of the page with the highest pagerank for the month. By the way, the faster crawl rate is not available for all sites, only if google determines that crawl rate MAY be a factor in getting your pages indexed. The change to faster lasts for 3 months. (Faster crawl rate could put a higher load on your server.) I found that sites with less than 20 pages (give or take) didn’t have the faster crawl option, bigger sites (20+) did have the option. (Rough estimate.)
Now… available in Beta form… The Linux version of the Flash player has been stuck at 7 for some time, while many sites require flash 8 for video/etc… (The page to find the beta download is here.)
sunbelt blog has yet MORE fake codec sites to watch out for. All are bad and should be AVOIDED… details after the jump….
Looks as though IE 7 release is imminent and will be in automatic updates on November 1st. Here’s one persons take on the user interface “improvements”. Now, there are many improvements in core functionality, but I’m annoyed by the user interface changes. I have spent quite a while with people getting use to the way the interface for windows programs have been for the last 10 years, now I feel like many of them will take another 5-8 years to get used to a NEW way to expect programs to be laid out….
Ebay is apparently aware of some problems with their new “Sell your item” tool and linux web browsers. The linux.com article above says that they tried with several browsers windows/linux/mac and the common denominator was linux. Even firefox on linux failed where firefox on windows worked (and the user agent switcher tool caused things to work if the agent was spoofed as being firefox on Windows.)
Ebay says they are aware and working on a solution and suggest linux users to use the 2.0 version of the sell your item tool.
If Microsoft patched 101 flaws in one release it would make big headlines – so this deserves some headlines too…. more coverage at incidents.org
If you’re interested I’ve got a “first impressions” look at the Zoom H4 over on the ashevillemusiclessons.com site. I couldn’t decide where it would be more appropriate to post…..
Along the way on my permissions nightmare last night, I made matters worse by changing permissions on a fairly important file. In order to fix that I was going to need to reboot from a boot disk. The only problem was boot floppys typically don’t come with reiserfs support (only the boot cds I’ve found have that.) AND my server has for some time refused to boot from the CD. Now, the BIOS will let you choose CD as the first boot device but it promptly decides that there is a “BIOS checksum mismatch” and reloads the defaults which leaves you booting from floppy, then hard drive…. Now, I’ve changed the CMOS battery twice within a 2 month span and I think the longest things lasted were about a week before it reverted to that “BIOS checksum mismatch” (For those of you smart enough to suggest I replace the CMOS battery.) Now, it could be that the battery I replaced with had expiired it’s shelf life already I suppose. But….
Yikes, what an evening….. it started innocently enough in the afternoon. I have an old Mandrake 10.0 server that I was upgrading clamav on (recent security update). While I was at it, I was reviewing the anti-spam setup to see if I could get any better success with filtering junk mail. spamassassin has had an update since I updated this one last and also it seemed that dcc was installed, but not in active use *(no indications that it’s being used at all.) So, I set about trying to fix that and install the latest spamassassin. Somehere along the way something BAD happened. In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure how, but at one point I was root having just installed the rpms for spamassassin and then exited to my user account. Promptly on switching back to my user account I got a “permission denied” error. Eh? Ok, well let’s su again and see what’s up…. “permission denied” uh oh…. ls “permission denied” most everything actually….. permission denied.